The effects of politicization in public organizations

The politicization of the civil service is one of the most analyzed and debated issues of public management over the last two decades. Regardless of all the institutional reforms implemented by governments to control this phenomenon, politicization continues jeopardizing the governance and public management of countries, especially those underdeveloped and developing countries. Several studies have inquired into the macro-effects of politicization comparing countries while others have confirmed the negative consequences politicization has on organizational performance. However, how such effects start at agencies, at the micro-level of public administration remains elusive. The purpose of this doctoral dissertation is to further inquiry into the effects that politicization has in public agencies. The driving question of this dissertation is what the effects of politicization into public organizations are. The notion of politicization has regularly been associated to the appointments of people in organizations, I examined the consequences of other notions of politicization, such as the influence exerted by political advisors into public agencies, as well as the pressures received by civil servants to manipulate objective information. To inquire into the effects of politicization in public agencies I first used qualitative data from 16 case studies and 70 interviews, which helped to explore the effects managerial politicization— or, alternatively, meritocratic recruitment of senior executives— has in public agencies, as well as to identify other broader manifestations of the phenomenon, beyond its conventional notion of appointing people due to political reasons. The qualitative stages informed the design of a survey distributed in Chile that contained four experiments testing the effects of different expressions of politicization of agencies such as the conventional appointment of managers, the influence of political advisors on administrative decisions as well as the manipulation of objective information. The results of this dissertation confirm that managerial politicization and other forms of politicization produce negative effects on the attitudes and the behavior of public personnel, as well as on other organizational features. The results confirmed a negative impact on the job satisfaction of civil servants, their work motivation and their organizational commitment. The findings also confirm that politicization causes a decline in the distributive justice and the workplace trust of bureaucrats.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference